I have a page with utf-8 encodin. Mysql is set to utf8_general_ci. Here is the query:
mysql_query(\"SET CHARACTER SET utf8_general_ci\");
$
I'm not sure if the mysql_query("SET ..") works as expected. Try setting the character set with mysql_set_charset(). Are you sure the text is inserted like that? If you're using the CLI mysql client with a wrong character set, display output may be faulty as well (that probably goes for retrieval via mysql_fetch_*() as well).